Friday, January 27, 2017

America’s New Path Leads Directly To Mordor

Those of us who worry about upcoming events more than we
should know intellectually that our overwrought reactions to stressful
situations are unnecessary, and that ninety-nine percent of the time everything
works out just fine. But there is that nagging one percent…and Donald Trump.

Trump is the rare case of an experience that turns out to be
worse than you could ever imagine. A nightmare come true. Every morning brings headlines
of new horrors from opening up national
parks to oil drilling to “alternative facts” to a president more concerned
about crowd sizes at his inauguration than governing the country. Americans are
living in a worse case scenario, a dystopian reality that was once the stuff of
Tom Clancy novels and George Orwell’s imagination.

We were warned many times in the past. Sinclair Lewis, Aldus
Huxley, Orwell, Gore Vidal, Margaret Atwood and many others raised flags
throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century about the real
possibility of a totalitarian take over in America. You won’t find it mentioned
in many American history books, but this country narrowly escaped a fascist
coup in the 1930s when a cabal of elites (including George Bush’s grandfather)
hatched a plan to use the military to overthrow FDR and establish a government
modeled on Nazi Germany.

It can happen here and now it has. Today we live in an
oligarchy that could slip at any moment into a totalitarian regime. Our status
as a democracy is in question around the world, and foreign leaders are clearly
alarmed and anxious as they monitor the actions of an American president
unhinged from reality. Everything that makes us a supposedly democratic society
is under threat, from a free press to freedom of assembly to the ability to
hold elected officials accountable, and is being eroded by an insecure,
mentally unstable president and his enabling administration.

Donald Trump is as bad as it can get. He represents
everything that is antithetical to what was once the world’s most admired
democracy. If he is allowed to remain in office for the next four years, our
country will end up having far more in common with Mordor than Oz.